Sweet

Some songs announce their feelings and some wear them down by repetition until something gives. "Sweet" is the second kind. It begins small, almost shy, and spends its running time building toward a release that feels less like a plan than like a pressure valve finally giving way.

The song is the lead single from Porridge Radio's second album, Every Bad, which Secretly Canadian released on 13 March 2020^[5]. It is a good place to meet the band, because it shows nearly everything they do well: a bedroom-scale confession that grows into a room-filling roar, delivered by a singer who sounds like she is arguing with herself and slowly winning.

Where it came from

Porridge Radio is a Brighton band, built around the singer and songwriter Dana Margolin. Margolin started the project in 2015 after teaching herself guitar and writing songs alone in her room^[8]. The group's first full-band album, Rice, Pasta and Other Fillers, arrived in 2016 and was recorded in the drummer's shed^[6]. That homemade beginning matters, because the intimacy of those early recordings never fully left the band's sound, even as the stakes grew.

Every Bad was made after the band had slimmed to a four-piece following the departure of a guitarist^[6]. It went on to earn a Mercury Prize nomination and strong reviews, with aggregate scores in the mid-eighties out of a hundred^[5]. "Sweet" was the song the band chose to introduce it, and the choice makes sense: it is both a hook and a statement of intent.

Margolin has summarized the song in plain terms. In her telling, it concerns holding grudges, learning how to have fun, and letting go of an older version of yourself^[1]. That is a modest-sounding set of subjects for a song that sounds this volcanic, and the gap between the description and the noise is part of what makes it interesting.

Resentment as a habit

Grudges are a strange emotional object. They feel like loyalty to your own hurt. To hold one is to keep a wound available for inspection, and to put one down can feel like admitting the injury did not matter. The song lives inside that discomfort.

Throughout, the narrator circles the same few thoughts rather than marching through a narrative. There is no tidy story of who wronged whom. Instead we get a mind in the grip of a loop, restating its position, testing it, and noticing that the position is exhausting to maintain. That structure is true to how resentment really behaves: it rarely progresses, it just returns.

Repetition is the album's governing technique. Paste singles it out as central to Every Bad^[7], and Spectrum Culture ties the repeated phrases to a kind of power that accumulates through insistence^[3]. In "Sweet" the device works as both symptom and cure. The repetition shows how stuck the narrator is, and then, by sheer persistence, it becomes the thing that carries her out.

Fun as a difficult task

The second theme in Margolin's own summary is the least expected one: learning how to have fun^[1]. We usually imagine fun as the opposite of work, something that arrives on its own. Here it reads as a skill the narrator has to acquire, almost against her instincts.

That framing lands because so much of the record is preoccupied with anxiety, self-doubt and the need for reassurance. One review described the album as seeking validation and endearing itself, desperately, to anyone who has felt the same. For someone who lives that way, enjoyment can feel like a risk. To relax your guard is to invite the thing you dread. So the song's lighter moods are hard won, and they carry more weight than carefree pop ever could.

There is a small irony in how this plays out musically. The band does not become polite or sunny to signal that the narrator is happier. It gets louder, rawer and more physical. In this world, fun looks like abandon, a willingness to be seen making a lot of noise.

Shedding an old self

The third theme, leaving behind an earlier version of yourself, explains the song's shape better than any other^[1]. Paste hears the track as a moment of self-assurance, in which long-held shame is replaced by something closer to charm and conviction^[2]. The narrator is not so much healed as reinvented, and the reinvention happens on the spot, in front of us.

Change in songs is often told as a before and after. This one lets us hear the crossing. The opening is hushed and tentative, the voice of the person who has carried the grudge and the shame. Spectrum Culture describes spindly guitar figures that are picked out and then submerged beneath a wave of distorted chords^[3]. DIY hears a glide from minimal sounds to a visceral vocal explosion^[4]. Taken together, those descriptions sketch a transformation in real time: the old self speaking quietly, the new one refusing to stay quiet.

It is worth noting how un-triumphant that triumph is. There is no victory lap, no clean resolution. The release is physical and slightly desperate, closer to a shout than a speech. That honesty keeps the song from tipping into self-help cliche. The narrator does not announce that she has become someone better. She simply sounds like someone who has stopped holding something in.

The loud and the quiet

Musically, the song belongs to a long tradition of quiet-to-loud dynamics in guitar music, the kind that early-nineties alternative bands made into an art. But the technique does particular work here. A slow build is also a way of representing restraint, and restraint is exactly what the lyrics are about. Every swell is a little more of the narrator's composure being spent.

Margolin's voice carries most of that weight. It can drop to something close to a murmur and then open into a full-throated, slightly ragged cry, and the rawness is never smoothed over. The rest of the band supports her without crowding her, leaving room for the tension between the controlled and the uncontrolled to stay audible.

A title with an edge

The title promises tenderness, and the song complicates it. Sweetness in this context is not softness so much as something earned, the relief of a mind that has stopped fighting itself. Listeners who expect a gentle number will find something harder, and listeners who expect pure aggression will find something unexpectedly kind. The word holds both.

That doubleness runs through Porridge Radio's catalogue. Margolin writes about love, shame and self-criticism with an unvarnished directness, yet the songs are rarely bleak. They keep reaching for warmth, even when the warmth arrives wrapped in feedback. Within the album's sequence, "Sweet" works as an early sign that the record will let its anxieties turn into something communal and even joyful.

The band's own origins reinforce that reading. A project that began as private bedroom songwriting and grew into a group playing to rooms of strangers has already lived out the arc the song describes, from solitary rumination to shared noise. Whether or not Margolin had that in mind, the biography and the music rhyme.

Why it resonates

Part of the appeal is how ordinary the central problem is. Almost everyone has nursed a resentment past its usefulness, or felt strangely guilty for enjoying themselves after a bad stretch. The song takes those small, embarrassing, everyday struggles seriously, and it treats the effort of moving past them as worthy of a full dynamic arc.

It also arrived at a particular moment. The album came out in the spring of 2020, just as the world went indoors, and many listeners found its portrait of anxious, looping thought uncomfortably familiar. A song about being stuck with your own mind and trying, through noise, to get out of it found a ready audience.

Other ways to hear it

Because the song is built on repetition and offers little concrete narrative, it supports more than one reading. One is romantic: the grudge belongs to a relationship, and the letting go is a form of moving on. Another is internal, with the grudge held against oneself, so that the old version of the self is both the offender and the injured party. Margolin's own description leaves room for both^[1].

A third reading treats the song as being about performance. Anyone who has watched the band live knows that the shows are cathartic, and a song that turns timid restraint into communal volume is, in effect, a small ritual. On that view the real subject is what happens when a private feeling is shared at high volume with other people. Nothing in the song forces any one of these interpretations, and it is stronger for that.

Conclusion

"Sweet" is a song about the labor of changing your mind about yourself. It treats resentment, pleasure and identity as things you do repeatedly until they either harden or give way. Its power comes from refusing to hurry that process, and then from the sheer relief of hearing it finally break.

As an introduction to Every Bad, it is hard to improve on. It shows the band's gift for turning tiny, unglamorous feelings into something enormous, and it shows a songwriter willing to let a feeling be messy on its way to becoming clear.